THE GERMAN CENTURY.

A major exhibition of twentieth-century German architecture opened at Frankfurt's DAM, the latest in the series devoted to European architecture.

How to appreciate architecture without experiencing it first hand is the dilemma of architecture museums. Academics and professionals may be satisfied with technical drawings but a lay public, on which museums depend, need models, virtual reality tours, or, at least, photography. Techniques beyond the pocket of most exhibitions.

In May Wilfried Wang ends his five year tenure as director of the Deutsches Architektur-Museum having laboured against the odds, a leaking roof and the need to beg for commercial sponsorship all while under fire from a culture media which expected objective quality without independent financial support. Architecture in the 20th century: Germany, is one of his last, and arguably his most controversial, exhibitions.

Germany had already been examined, using original drawings and text, in Modern Architecture in Germany 1900-1950, a trilogy shown between 1992 and 1998. The overwhelming quantity of material was fascinating but a dry academic experience for non-architects. In the context of the European twentieth century series the curators looked for a more exciting presentation, one which would bring building users into the frame. They chose eleven non-architectural photographers to record over 100 projects in their present state and with their present users. Poster pictures, in the pseudo reality style of today's magazines, show workers, executives, civil servants and residents against weathered concrete and building finishes less glossy than when first captured for the architectural press. User appreciation or indifference is revealed in the chintzy interiors of Modernist icons, such as Pieter Oud's Weissenhof Siedlung housing(l927), the bald lawns surrounding satellite slab blocks in Trabant towns and an irreverent, but more interesting, spin-off use of Gropius's Neue Galerie podium as a skateboarding arena. This survey is not an architectural shopping catalogue or national homage but a warts-and-all panorama only made possible by non-commercial sponsorship.

Fourteen categories preclude the usual architectural tourist guide approach. Under 'My home is my castle' the English country house ideal of Muthesius (Haus Freudenberg, 1908) stands next to Thut's private ecological paradise for those of more modest means (Terraces, Munich 1978) and Scharoun's one-off Modernism (Haus Baensch, 1935) rubs up against Everyman's urban flat of the late nineties (Kollhof/Timmermann, Berlin flats, 1994). 'Divide and manage' shows the reality of a good theory, such as Burolandschaft, in the present German automobile association offices (ADAC Munich 1992) compared with the disciplined Classicism of Behrens' 1912 Mannesmann's Dusseldorf headquarters or his Expressionist glazed brickwork patterns in the Frankfurt Hochst administration building. At the other end of the spectrum the employment exchange buildings programme, instigated by the Weimar Republic (Hahn and Schroeder in Kiel, 1929), attempted a similar grand order in the management of the unemployed themselves. Can an architect ure lose its original aura or is Sagebiel's Berlin Air Ministry (Reichsluftfahrtministerium, 1936) with its marble halls and over-dimensioned expanses of column-free space, less intimidating now it is refurbished and fitted out with twenty-first century workspaces for a democratic government? As the home of the first motorway and corollary motorway bridges, cited by Abercrombic as a positive development in his Greater London Plan 1944, the section Getting Around shows propaganda photography of an Autobahn service station (Furstenwalde 1937) with state of the art reinforced concrete flat canopy, the viaduct bridges of Bonatz (1938-40) and Leipzig's (Lossow/Kuhne, 1915) cathedral to rail transport as against Dortmund's planned flying saucer (BRT Architects, 1999).

Investigating architecture's roles, as opposed to starting from the end product created by star architects, is a better dipstick for evaluating economic and political agendas. West Germany's post-1945 social pact between the generations and East Germany's caring state programme are placed in context as are the concentration camps (Sachsenhausen, Berhard Kuiper/SS architectural office, 1936-44), industrial workers towns (VW Wolfsburg) and high security prisons of more recent terrorist history. Exceptional texts in the exhibition and accompanying book are impressive excavations of the many layered meanings of built form by historians, critics, a political theorist, a psychoanalyst, structural engineer and sociologist.

This retrospective makes clear what the previous seven exhibitions in this series fudged with impressive images: that is the increasing regimentation of European society aided by architecture and planning; the industrialization of form and process, planned and regimented holiday experiences, repetitive cell offices and conveyor belt administration. Although this tendency is clearer in a country which so efficiently processed human material it does not place other Europeans on any morally higher plane. Architectural materials, High-tech, Po-Mo, Eco, are all taxis for hire, regardless of national boundaries. Gelsenkirchen-Feldmark prison (Bohm, 1998) looks perhaps better than a modern college campus with its steel clad sports dome, stone stepped tribune and landscaped exercise yard. Architectural differences between voluntary or legal incarceration are sometimes hard to discern.

Critics were puzzled. The contemporary norm of privately sponsored knowledge has led vested interests to expect uncritical public relations exercises in support of their import-export trade. For some the exhibition lacked glamour. Others saw a missed opportunity for the pillorying of political ideologies. Curators were questioned as to whether they had given enough weight to GDR architecture. Another took exception at what he thought was an attempt to lay open the German psyche. Wilfried Wang, when asked which part of the exhibition he thought most revealing answered, 'The section "Adaptation and segregation" which includes old people's homes, hospitals, prisons and concentration camps, because how a society treats its minorities, weak, sick, or unwanted, is a measure of its civilization.'

Architektur in 20 Jahrhundert: Deutschland is at the Deutsches Architektur-Museum, Frankfurt am Main, until 25 June. The catalogue is published by Prestel, Munich.